“I suppose,” said Pauncefote, “Governor Roosevelt is too much the soldier for this-heady political life.”
“Soldier!” Blaise laughed delightedly. “He’s just a politician who got lucky in Cuba.”
“But that was a famous victory over Spain, and he was part of it.”
“As architect, yes,” said Blaise, and Caroline was surprised that her brother seemed to know of the plotting that had gone on amongst Roosevelt and Lodge and the Adamses and Captain Mahan. “But not as a soldier. The real story in Cuba-which the Chief will never print-is not how we bravely defeated the Spanish but how seven hundred brave Spaniards nearly beat six thousand incompetent Yanks.”
Pauncefote stared, wide-eyed, at Blaise. “I have never read this in any newspaper.”
“You never will, either,” said Blaise. “In this country, anyway.”
“Until I publish it.” Caroline was indeed tempted to puncture the vast endlessly expanding balloon of American pomposity and jingoism.
“You won’t.” Blaise was flat. “Because you’d lose the few readers you’ve got. We create news, Lord Pauncefote.”
“Empires, too?” The Ambassador had recovered his professional ministerial poise.
“One follows on the other, if the timing’s right.” Blaise was indifferent; and most Hearstian, thought Caroline.
“I shall reexamine the careers of Clive and Rhodes, with close attention to the Times of their day.”
“Lord North’s career would be more to the point.” Blaise was hard. Caroline wondered who had been educating him; certainly not Hearst. Plon joined them; and Pauncefote withdrew.
“Have you found a rich lady?” asked Caroline.
“Oh, they are-what do the English say?-thick upon the ground. But they cannot talk.”
“Bring him to Washington.” Caroline turned to Plon. “We are rich in ladies whose husbands are under the ground. And they talk-the ladies, that is.”
“Perhaps we’ll both come, after the election.” Blaise stared, idly, at a pale blond girl who was approaching them, on the arm of a swarthy youth. What color, wondered Caroline, would the children of so contrasted a couple be? “But New York is more Plon’s sort of oyster.”
“Oyster?” Plon’s grasp of idiom was weak. “Huître?” He translated, tentatively.
To Caroline’s amazement the blond girl greeted her warmly. “Frederika, Miss Sanford.” The voice was Southern; the manner shy; the profile, turned to Caroline, noble. “I’m Mrs. Bingham’s daughter. From Washington. Remember?”
“You’ve grown up.” Caroline had hardly noticed the child in Washington; a child, literally, until this summer.
“It’s the dress, really. Mother won’t let me dress up at home.”
“Mrs. Bingham is Washington,” Caroline declared.
“Is she a widow?” asked Plon, in French.
“Not yet,” murmured Caroline. The swarthy young man proved to be from the Argentine embassy, a representative of what John Hay wearily termed “the dago contingent” until Caroline had allied herself sternly with the entire Latin race and “dago” was no longer a word used in her volatile presence:;
Frederika was thrilled by the half-brothers; they were characteristically indifferent to her. She was too young and pure for Plon; and Blaise’s mind-Caroline never thought to associate the word “heart” with so blond and fierce a beast-was elsewhere.
“Is your mother here?” Caroline knew that there was no earthly way, as yet, for Mrs. Benedict Tracy Bingham, wife to Washington’s milk king, to break into Newport’s Casino on such a night.
“Oh, no. I visit friends. You see, Mother likes Washington in the summer.” There was a sudden mischievous, even collusive, look in Frederika’s eyes. As Caroline was deciding that the girl had possibilities, the Argentine swept her away.
“Her father,” said Caroline, to Plon, “makes all of Washington’s milk.”
“How funny!” Plon laughed delightedly.
“Why funny?”
“It’s my English, I suppose, but for a moment I thought you said he made ‘milk.’ ” Caroline let the subject go. Plon was better in Paris. Blaise-and she-were better suited to this new world of energetic and mindless splendor, of waste-of absolute waste of everything and, she wondered, suddenly feeling disagreeably faint, of everyone?
EIGHT
1
FOUR OF THE ORIGINAL Five Hearts were gathered in Henry Adams’s study, to John Hay’s delight. Although the pale April sun filled the study, Adams as always had a fire blazing and the smell of wood-smoke mingled agreeably with that of the masses of daffodils and lilies-of-the-valley the incomparable servant, Maggie, had placed everywhere. The fourth Heart-Clarence King-stood with his back to the fire, Adams to his right, all admiration like a schoolgirl, and Clara to his left, all fondness like a sister, while King talked rapidly and brilliantly and coughed and laughed at his own coughing, and coughed again. “I have a spot on my lung now, the size of a dollar-why always a dollar, I wonder? But better the coin than the greenback. I thought the sun would cure me, as it always has before, but Florida has failed me, as Florida has failed so many before me, including you, John. Didn’t you want to be a congressman from there in 1864?”
“From there, oh, yes,” said Hay. “I like to pretend it was President Lincoln’s idea, to get friends into Congress. But the carpetbag I took to Florida was all my own…” And then, Hay completed to himself, just as I was about to quit as the President’s secretary, he was shot. Hay wondered, yet again, how strange it was that he, who dreamed now so much at night, no longer encountered the Ancient in his dreams.
Although Clarence King was dying, he was determined to go in a great display of mind and wit and energy. He was bearded like Hay and Adams: the three had more or less synchronized their beards, each allowing the rakish moustaches of youth to act as foundation for the stately beards of middle age.
Hay had been shocked at the change in King, who had arrived some days before, haggard and ill-kempt. But William and Maggie had taken him in hand; put him to bed; fed him magnificently. “Tuberculosis does wonders for the appetite,” King had announced at the first meal-High Communion, Adams had called it-of the Hearts, and Hay noticed that a fifth place had been left at table for the fifth never-to-be-mentioned Heart, Clover Adams. Except that King, quite naturally, would repeat something that Clover had said, and Adams seemed not at all perturbed; but then King could do no wrong for Henry Adams, who had declared his friend the greatest man of their generation, causing Hay a pang of ignoble envy; but then Henry Adams had always been in love-there was no other word-with the geologist, naturalist, philosopher, world-traveller, creator of mining enterprises, Renaissance man who, now that his life was near its end, had managed to fail on the grandest scale. He had been wiped out in the depression of ’93, and though he still went exploring in the Yukon and other parts of the world, he was now merely a brilliant geologist, employed by others. There would be no King Mine, no King fortune, no King widow and children; only the memory that the Hearts all had of a glorious companion who could sit up till dawn speaking on the origins of life, and, presumably, they could go look at a mountain called Clarence King, a superb peak in the Sierra Nevada.
A mountain and a memory were not much, thought Hay; but then what a life King had had. While Adams and Hay had sat at desks, reading and writing, or hovering on the periphery of power, King had explored and mapped the West, and written marvellously of the new world he had discovered, not to mention the geological wealth that other men would exploit. So taken with the idea of King was Adams that he had fled from Harvard to the Far West to travel with King, to rough it. In later years they had often travelled together, most recently to Cuba. Each had developed a passion for Polynesian women, “old-gold girls,” as they would cryptically refer to these palpable visions, unknown to Hay. Then, in 1879, King became director of the United States Geological Survey, a bureau created largely for him, with considerable assistance from Senator James G. Blaine, who was less than amused when the novel Democracy, suspected to be a work by one of the Hearts, lampooned him as the venal Senator Ratcliff. Hay had often wondered if Henry Adams had, somehow, instinctively, harmed the man he loved and envied above all others. By 1880, King had departed the only office that he had ever wanted; he had also entered the lives of John and Clara Hay; and, thus, due to highly elective affinities, Five Hearts beat as one until Clover Adams swallowed potassium cyanide; and then there were Four. Soon, Hay thought bleakly, as April light made glitter King’s feverish eyes, there would be Three; then Two, One, None. Why?